It took me about ten minutes to explain private equity and capital to the Buckminsters, both of who seemed to understand the concepts. The Buckman Group also seemed to go over, although Harlan asked the inevitable question — “So where did you get the money to start this? Is it family money?”
I shook my head. “Definitely not. For one thing, my family doesn’t have this kind of dough, nowhere near it, in fact. For another thing, I’m the black sheep of the family. I’ve never received a penny from them. I haven’t even seen my family since the wedding, and that was the first time I had seen them in years. Except for my sister, of course. She and I are close, but that’s it.”
“Why not?” asked Anna Lee. “What’s wrong with you and your family?”
I smiled and shook my head. “I haven’t had anywhere near enough to drink to start talking about my family. No, trust me when I say I never got the money from them. I did it the old fashioned way, I earned it. I’ve had a brokerage account since I was thirteen years old, and I am very, very good at picking stocks. By the time I got to college, I didn’t even need a scholarship, I could have paid my own way if I wanted to.”
Harlan’s eyes goggled at that. He was as patriotic as the next guy, but a big piece of why he went army was the ROTC scholarship. “So why did you take the ROTC scholarship?” he asked.
“Why not? I wanted to go in the army anyway, even if just for a few years. I gave the Army four-and-a-half years and a blown knee and seventeen live paratroopers in the end. They can’t say they didn’t get their money’s worth out of me.”
“So, how much are you worth?”
“How much are you worth, Harlan? That’s not a question people ask, generally. Millions. If this Buckman Group thing works out as well as I think it will, billions. That’s why I never told you anything. People get weird when they know you have serious bucks.”
“Billions?!” said both Marilyn and Harlan. Anna Lee just stared with her mouth open.
“Probably within ten years.” I grinned over at my wife. “Just remember that the next time you think you want to kill me. The longer you hold off, the more you’ll be able to inherit!”
“There’s times I think it would be worth it!” she said, and then gave me a raspberry.
I waggled my eyebrows at her lewdly. “That’s not what you said before!” That got me another raspberry.
“So, what were you signing on?” asked Harlan.
I shook my head. “As of now, that’s confidential. In a few years’ time, when the company goes public, I will be able to tell you, but for right now, I can’t say. I will say, it’s going to be very, very big!”
“Huh.” He thought for a second. “So, can anybody buy into this group?”
“Sorry, but we are very closely held. I have four partners in this, and they all had to cough up a quarter mill each. That being said, you never know. Some day we might want to do a sale ourselves. If that happens, I’ll let you know.”
Harlan rolled his eyes. “Man, I never knew a millionaire, let alone a billionaire.”
I grinned. “You still haven’t! Give me ten years, though, and I’ll have that and more!”
“Unreal!”
“Listen, I’m still the same guy who smacked the Orange Army around with you way back when. I am not about to start buying mansions around the world. The next time you are back on the mainland, plan to take a few days and visit us in Maryland. You’ll see! Yes, we’re building a house, but it’s just a simple rancher. We don’t have servants or chauffeurs. I promise you, nothing has changed. We’ll do a barbecue on the deck, just like the others we’ve had.”
Harlan rolled his eyes. “Maybe not! We don’t need to try and set the deck on fire like we did in Fayetteville!”
“Oh, shit, no! That was all Marilyn’s fault anyway!” Marilyn flipped us both a middle finger as we recounted the last barbecue, last summer before I went to Honduras. Marilyn had come out to the rear balcony and tripped on the little hibachi grill, kicking it over and spilling hot coals all over everything. Harlan and I had to hop around and put it out with the only thing we had available — our beers!
It’s like I said before. Anything involving Marilyn and food has a tendency towards disaster. She has superhuman powers in this regard.
Chapter 75: Back Home
We flew home on Saturday. Harlan and Anna Lee were treating us like normal again by Wednesday, which was a damn good thing. They were too good a pair of friends to lose because they couldn’t handle our having money. Tusker and Tessa had handled it well, but Tusker had figured it out on his own. We made them promise to visit us sometime in the summer of ’83 when he had built up some leave.
We flew home on Saturday, and since the time zones are working against you, we landed sometime on Sunday. We were both totally exhausted, and fell asleep as soon as we got to the town house. It was at times like this that I truly envied Marilyn’s ability to fall asleep anytime and anywhere, within ten seconds of closing her eyes. Now, if I could only figure out a way to control her snoring…
Monday morning I woke up early, did my workout, and then cleaned up and left early. I drove over to the house and discovered that the framing was finished and it was actually starting to look like a house, and not a war zone in the mud. Happy, I headed back towards civilization and went to the office. We had our regular Monday morning meeting, and it was pretty positive.
“Well, I’m simply going to start off by saying thank you to everybody here. There were a whole lot of ways this thing could have fallen through, and it didn’t. This was what will prove to be a potentially gargantuan deal,” I told them. “So, here’s my agenda for today. First and foremost, thank you all. We worked hard, we worked as a team, and we got this accomplished faster than I thought we could. I just came back from vacation. Now it’s your turn. Everybody needs to call Taylor and schedule a vacation.”
John and Jake looked surprised at that, Junior had a thoughtful look, and Missy smiled, but otherwise seemed a touch distracted. Jake said, “A vacation?”
I nodded. “I don’t care whether the company pays for it or I pay for it. Everybody gets a week. Get crazy, Jake.”
“Huh?”
I grinned at him some more. “Let’s put a limit on it. You get one week anywhere in North America or the Caribbean, airfare, rooms, whatever. Take a cruise, go skiing, hang-glide over the Grand Canyon. I don’t care. Take your wife, too, if you want. Or your mistress. Hell, take them both!” That got me a bagel thrown in my direction. “Just call Taylor and sort it out.”
Junior smiled and muttered, “Wow!” The others just looked at each other and smiled.
“Second item on the agenda. We need to debrief what we did right on this deal and what we did wrong. We can always improve. We’ll be doing more deals as time goes on. How do we do them better? Third item — over the next few days I want to meet with each of you individually. Same questions, what are we doing right, what are we doing wrong, how do we do things better? The final item is what do we do next? I want to go over that with you all as well.” I looked around the table and saw everybody nodding in agreement and understanding. I grabbed a notepad and a pen, and said, “Let’s get started.”
The next few days were busy and productive. If nothing else, doing the Microsoft deal had boosted our confidence that we could actually pull something like this off. Maybe we weren’t all crazy! There were some valid concerns. For one thing, we would need to boost the staffing on the legal and accounting ends, in order to do the due diligence and reviews necessary. If we did that, then we needed to start accounting for costs involved in the purchases and investments, so we had to set something up for that. There was considerable concern about where we would come up with the next few deals. If we got big enough, people would come to us, but for the time being, it was much more likely that we would need to find the deals, and not the reverse.